Reads tagged with “culture”
Storytelling and the Art of Tenderness: Olga Tokarczuk’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
“Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it… It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our ‘self.’”
The Poetic Science of the Aurora Borealis
“And now commenced a display which baffles all description.”
M.C. Escher on Creativity and Grasping the Largest Mystery Through the Immense Beauty of the Very Small
“What is that so-called reality; what is this theory other than a beautiful but primordially human illusion?”
Nature Is Always Listening: The Science of Mushrooms, Music, and How Sound Waves Stimulate Mycelial Growth
What playing music has to do with the happiness of the forest.
Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska’s Poem “Love at First Sight,” Illustrated
“Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.”
How the Eel Almost Became America’s Thanksgiving Food
“At night, he came home with as many eels as he could well lift in one hand, which our people were glad of. They were fat & sweet.”
How We Co-Create and Recreate the World: Octavio Paz on Sor Juana, Poetry as Rebellion, and the Creative Collaboration Between Writers and Readers
“A work responds to the reader’s, not the author’s, questions.”
Le Monde de la Mer: Stunning 19th-Century French Illustrations of the Wonders of the Sea
Dive into “the world of the sea in its luxury and its agitations.”
The Unphotographable: Jack Kerouac’s Soaring Diary Entry About Self-Understanding and the Elemental Vastness of the Windblown World
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable — Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.
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